Literature Review #2

Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic. N.p., 1 July 2008. 
     Web. 5 Nov. 2013. <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/ 
     is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/>. 

            This article, written by Nicolas Carr, depicts how the Internet is slowly taking over society as a whole today. People can no longer concentrate on one single task, and with the element of technology in almost every aspect of our lives, we are slowly becoming less like humans and more like computerized devices. Although our lives are more proficient due to technology, people are no longer absorbing and understanding many aspects of school, communication and life itself due to the abilities of these computerized devices.

            Nicholas Carr is a writer from the United States, who has extensive knowledge regarding technology and its affect on society. He has written numerous articles relating to the topic, and one of his novels was a finalist for the nonfiction Pulitzer Prize in 2011. He studied at Harvard University, and his writing is very popular today.

            Carr uses the term “power browse” in which he explains that people are no longer completely immersing themselves into a single article from start to finish, yet they are searching for key information and then moving onto the next article as if on a hunt.

            He also creates another term for the Internet deduced society of today; calling society, “pancake people”.  Pancake People try to intake as much information as possible just with the simple task of using technology, therefore making us very shallow and simple as pancakes.

            “As media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960’s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought” (Carr 2).

            “As we use what sociologist Daniel Bell has called our ‘intellectual technologies’-the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capabilities-we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies” (Carr 4).

            “As we are drained of our ‘inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,’ Foreman concluded, we risk turning into ‘pancake people’-spread wide and thin as we connect with the vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button” (Carr 8).

            This article has significant value on determining how much technology can affect society. It is clear that many people of today no longer use the internet and technology strictly as an aid to thinking, but the internet is becoming basically the mode of all their thinking and understanding.